iQi Weekly Round-Up

This week's top stories...

The Smartphone Alliance Reader Survey 2011 - organised by Steel Media, the publisher of Qi - offers you the chance to win an iPad 2 or an Android tablet, in exchange for approximately five minutes of your earth time. Answer a few questions on your mobile phone habits and smartphone purchases and potentially say ‘hello, hello’ to a brand-new iPad 2. Here’s the survey.

If you decide to lay down some cash on Polarbit's adrenaline-fuelled racer Reckless Getaway, you'll gain access to the game's brand-new chapter, which features an extra vehicle and some additional tracks to thrash around. Reckless Getaway managed to swerve its way onto Qi's Top 10 iPhone games of July 2011 list, so I don't know what you're hanging around for.

After a recent UI overhaul, Instagram users can experiment with live filters, apply instant tilt-shifts, and toggle photo borders on and off - all from the main launch screen. In addition, Burbn has made four new filters - Amaro, Rise, Hudson, and Valencia - available to its millions of guerrilla photographers. The high-resolution shots captured by the hardcore element of the Instagram community can finally be saved to the iPhone’s Camera Roll now, too.

Gameloft's remake of classic Apple II side-scrolling adventure title The Oregon Trail can now be downloaded completely free of charge. This is mainly to celebrate the imminent release of its sequel, The Oregon Trail: American Settler. The Oregon Trail was conceived to teach kids about the realities of 19th century pioneer life, and it therefore tasks you with overcoming a bunch of related issues, including bandit attacks and random bouts of dysentery.

If you don’t already know, Qi trawls the print and online media for game and app reviews from respected sources like Macworld, TiPb, 148Apps, and GameSpot. A unique Qi formula is then applied to each site and publication to establish a definitive Qi score for the app or game. Top 5 recommendation lists, news round-ups, and regular industry analysis complement the dynamic Qi charts. Qi has its own Twitter feed, too, @qualityindex.

Notable changes to the Quality Index charts

Combining the traditional wordplay of Scrabble with the strategic backbone of Risk comes the high-scoring Quarrel Deluxe, an iPhone game so perfectly suited to the platform it’s a wonder we didn’t see the likes of it sooner.

If conquering islands and defeating enemy troops through the strength and might of your lexicon sounds like your cup of tea, Indiagames’s anagram-seeking word game should be top of your download list this week.

Quarrel Deluxe has captured an 8.5 rating from a quintet of critiques, including this incredibly positive assessment from 148Apps: “Quarrel is a phenomenal game. Frustrations aside, it is so enjoyable and very hard to put down.”

Do you want to know The Secret of Chateau de Moreau’s success? Easy. A bit of detective work here, some hidden object-hunting there, and dozens of riddles over yonder.

The protagonist of Four Thirty Three’s murder-mystery saga Antoine has been framed for the killing of his foster father - the Count Moreau. To clear his name, he must therefore discover the identity of the true assassin. Oh, and tell the police.

I wouldn’t be so insensitive and inconsiderate to unmask the actual murderer in this forum, of course. That’s partly because there are 40 alternative endings, and partly because I’m a thoughtful soul.

And continuing the theme of chateaux, Samurai Bloodshow fuses elements of the castle defence genre with trading card-based gameplay to forge a refreshingly compelling battlefield experience.

In Slide to Play’s considered opinion, Sega’s army-building campaigns “will thrill guys and gals who like high-stress micromanagement games. Victory is hard to achieve (and each campaign level can be beaten on higher difficulty settings that offer rich rewards), but when you grab it, it's sweet.”